By Tobias Eigen | Founder and Executive Director
We have had a busy month building the new Kabissa, as you will see in the update on Kabissa Activities below.
We are excited about the progress we are making on establishing Kabissa as a self-sustaining, volunteer-run network connecting people and organizations for Africa.
However, we are operating close to the margins currently and urgently need donations to be able to continue. If you were considering waiting until December to donate to Kabissa or to tell your friends to support us, please reconsider in light of Global Giving's generous matching program - see below.
We also need your vote in a Netsquared Challenge going on right now to receive a $5,000 grant as well as recognition and support to realize the potential of the Kabissa platform. Details below.
In solidarity and gratitude,
Tobias Eigen, Kabissa Founder
Starting on October 12, GlobalGiving is matching at all donations to Kabissa at 30%, 40%, or 50%. The match percentage is based on the size of the donation.
$10 – $499 –> 30%
$500 – $999 –> 40%
$1,000 – $2,500 — > 50%
There is $100,000 available in matching funds. The campaign will run until Oct 21 or until matching funds run out.
Please note:
Between October 11-15, community voting is open on Netsquared.org for projects participating in the FACT Social Justice Challenge. Kabissa has thrown its hat into the ring with a powerful idea to build the Kabissa platform and we have a very good chance at success - but we need your help!
Kabissa Connections
http://netsquared.org/projects/kabissa-connectionsAgricultural Marketing Information Services - Cameroon
http://netsquared.org/projects/agricultural-marketing-information-serviViolent Water Conflicts In Kenya’s Ewaso Ngiro River Basin: Fighting Back With Fair Water Sharing, Metering, Water Conservation And A Win-Win Electronic Peace Building Formula
http://netsquared.org/projects/violent-water-conflicts-kenya-s-ewaso-ng
Thank you!
If we are among the 5 winners, we will receive a cash award of $5,000 and recognition on the NetSquared and FACT web sites. In addition to direct financial support through the FACT Social Justice Award, FACT is generously supporting fund development assistance for all FACT Featured Projects. This assistance will connect us with fundraising experts and guidance to help us move towards increased investments and greater community impact.
In a nutshell, Kabissa Connections will address trust concerns by providing a platform revealing the connections that organizations have with networks, international organizations, supporters and service providers. We will do this for organizations working in Africa while collaborating with others on open source tools, standards and approaches that can be replicated in other regions.
Mark Root-Wiley, a freelance web designer in Seattle, is generously contributing his time as a volunteer to create a new formatted template for our newsletter.
As Kabissa old-timers will recall, the Kabissa Gong Gong newsletter is delivered to your email mailbox on a monthly basis and contains a roundup of the best and most useful content on the Kabissa website.
We will send out the next newsletter soon, so please add your contributions to the site and make sure you are subscribed to get it when it comes out!
Kabissa is collaborating with WiserEarth to survey members and non-members working in West Africa in order to gather information that will guide future priorities for our two organizations.
We are experimenting with an idea to collaborate with Kabissa members to "curate" tags used to categorize content added to the Kabissa site, with the goal of raising awareness about important current issues and to encourage members to participate in the Kabissa community. 2aid.org, a German charity that works on projects to bring clean water to rural communities in Africa, has agreed to curate the WATER tag in connection with Blog Action Day 2010.
After two weeks of testing email discussions in Kabissa groups with only positive results, we have now made some changes to start encouraging Kabissa members to start using it more actively to connect, share information and help one another - directly by email.
From now on, when members join groups at signup or via the groups directory, they now automatically start receiving new posts by email - and their replies to posts are distributed to all other subscribers and added to the site as comments.
To ease the transition, existing Kabissa Group members are all set to nomail by default - you can log in anytime to turn on/off email delivery or switch to daily digest mode.
We are spending $4,450 of the money raised in August on a crucial upgrade to our Membership Database platform. We are almost finished with this upgrade now and are working with volunteers to help us test it and identify bugs.
This much needed upgrade will fix a range of bugs and bring improvements to the way community members can add and maintain their organization profiles on Kabissa. It also will provide new features such as a completely overhauled user interface for administering the database and new tools for managing membership, donations, mailings, reporting and more.
In addition, this upgrade lays the groundwork for projects we would like to carry out in partnership with other organizations next year to leverage the benefits of the Kabissa platform. This includes the Kabissa Connections project idea we submitted to Netsquared. Please help us by voting for it!
The 2009 Audit is progressing well, and due to be completed on time by November 15th so that we can submit our 990 tax return and application for continued membership in Aid for Africa, a unique partnership of some 80 select charities, all dedicated to solving the complex, inter-related challenges facing Africa.
We have a board meeting scheduled for November 4th, at which the two main agenda items are sustainability and board development. In particular we are discussing and agreeing on a plan to establish board terms and expand the board from 5 to 9 board members over the course of the next two years. Our goal is to bring in more stakeholders to the board who can take on key roles as volunteers to keep Kabissa running and growing, as well as represent the interests of members working in different parts of Africa and working on different issues.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
